Ema Katrovas is an opera-singer-turned-experimental-performer, translator, and an aspiring artist-researcher.

She was performer and/or co-creator in interdisciplinary projects for the Prague City Gallery and the Czech National Monument of Literature. She has appeared as a classical concert soloist at, among others, the new music series of the PKF-Prague Philharmonia and the Schubert Club in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her formative performance years were as a soloist in opera productions at the F.X. Šalda Theater in Liberec and the Silesian Theater in Opava, among others.

A book of her translations into English of the works of Czech poet Pavel Šrut came out under the title Paper Shoes with Carnegie Mellon University Press (2009). She also published translations of two short stories by Bohumil Hrabal in literary journals (Hayden’s Ferry Review, 2010, and the now defunct Calque, 2009). Her own short story came out in Redivider Journal in 2019. For over a decade, she has also translated for film, theatre, and art galleries, notably for HBO or the Nutprodukce production company.

She has a Master’s in classical voice from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. She spent two years in Lyon, France, working on an Artist Diploma-CréationS at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon and is currently a doctoral student at the GLAREAN college at the University of Strasbourg, where she is working on an artistic research project called “Poor Opera: In Search of Vocal Theatre.”

Ema got interested in cultural journalism sometime in 2019 and since then has been writing and making podcasts about issues related to the arts. In the summer of 2021, she had the opportunity to attend the academy of the Aix-en-Provence Festival as a cultural journalist.

She grew up in Prague, Czech Republic, and New Orleans, United States. She spent every summer since she can remember being around (as a child), working for (as a teen) and coordinating (in her 20s) the Prague Summer Program for Writers. This portrait of Ema’s father by Alan Levy explains the origin’s of Ema’s Czech-American family.

For full artistic profile visit www.emakatrovas.com